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Social media branding is simple, but it’s not easy. While the idea behind building and maintaining your brand on social media seems straightforward (e.g., set up an account, start posting, rinse and repeat), the details can get really unwieldy.

The challenge becomes even more acute for consulting firms since reputation makes up a huge part of their business model. Social media is a great place for consulting companies to showcase their expertise and position themselves as thought leaders. But it takes a sound strategy to successfully pull off social media branding, given social media’s unpredictability.

Today’s blog entry provides a brief but complete guide to developing a social media branding strategy. We focus on consulting firms because there’s a lot of interesting things going on in these organization’s branding campaigns. Use this post’s key points as a checklist to see if your strategy needs improvement in a specific area.

Laying the Groundwork

Social media branding depends on four essential things to work as expected: identity, audience, content, and design. You need to nail each of these down before diving into creating your strategy.

Identity

Your brand identity is simply the things that people think of when they come across your company or service. Your brand identity conveys your firm’s purpose, values, and qualities to your target audience. It goes beyond brand identifiers like logos, typography, and colors. It’s everything that your brand identifiers represent.

To clearly define your brand identity, carefully go through the following checklist (brought to us by Andrew Spence at Jiggle Digital):

Know your firm’s position relative to competitors (a SWOT analysis)

Define your mission and set what your company strives to achieve

Explain why you exist (How do you make your clients’ lives better?)

Describe your brand’s personality

Craft your unique value proposition (the value that no one else can deliver except your firm)

Audience

There’s no hard-and-fast formula for success in social media branding. But the surest way to fail (borrowing an idea from Herbert Bayard Swope) is trying to appeal to everyone. Narrowing your target audience strengthens your branding since targeted messages are more relevant and compelling.

Aside from identifying your audience, you also need to understand them inside-out. That means getting into their shoes and really learning about their problems, motivations, and needs.

The content you share on social media helps define the brand image you’re trying to project. It’s important to know the difference between content for branding vs. conversion-oriented content. Branding-focused content seeks to grow the size of your audience, while lead generation content taps into the audience you’re already reaching to identify potential new clients.

Social media speaker Rebekah Radice recommends building your content strategy using what you know about your audience and finding out what content types get the most interactions on social media. For starters, she suggests experimenting with any of the following content types:

Social media is primarily a visual channel. That’s why good design goes hand-in-hand with compelling content in social media branding. Visual elements influence the way your social media followers see your brand identity. So, it pays to maintain consistent design practices across your social media assets that align with your brand image.

Having a social media style guide really helps in bringing a coherent brand experience to your social media audience, no matter which platform they interact with your brand. Sprout Social spells out the things to include in your visual guidelines (for profile images/header graphics as well as photos/graphics/videos shared within posts:

Brand colors

Fonts for graphics

Acceptable color combinations (per social platform)

Photos of your office and team members

Logos

Building Your Social Media Branding Strategy

For an industry where strategic thinking is the main product, social media’s messy reality can be off-putting to people who usually deal with clearly defined scenarios. Going for the “perfect” or a “foolproof” strategy isn’t the way to approach social media branding.

Branding strategist Peter Thompson recommends aiming for “minimum viable clarity” when developing a social media branding plan. The key thing is to gain a clear idea of basic positioning and messaging.

Brand awareness goals traditionally fall into two main categories: brand recall and brand recognition. With social media, branding goals are divided into exposure, engagement, and influence. The goals you set (such as increasing page likes or post shares) belong to any of these three.

The reason why most social media branding goals don’t stick is that they’re oftentimes too broad and unmanageable. Even branding goals need to be SMART goals, too. Here’s how to set achievable branding objectives on social media:

Gauge how well each objective you set aligns with overall business goals

Choosing the Right Platforms

It takes a decent amount of resources to maintain a genuine social media presence in just one platform. That’s why a lot of brands only concentrate on a handful of social networks at a time. But that’s okay since your target audience will only be in a small number of these channels anyway. The challenge now is to find which ones to focus on.

LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the mainstay of any social media branding strategy, especially one that’s geared toward a business audience. But there’s plenty of other industry-specific channels ideal for consulting firms’ branding initiatives, too. To determine which ones to include in your social media mix, consider the following:

Is your target audience actively using the platform?

Does the platform align with the type of content you’re sharing?

What social networks do your competitors focus on?

Peter Thompson lays out the backbone of any social media presence for consulting firms. This includes a mix of company accounts along with the personal accounts of senior partners and key employees. He suggests the following components of a basic social media portfolio:

There are two ways to join the social media conversation with your content. First is to craft original content and showcase it through your posts (content creation). The other one involves sharing relevant content from other sources (content curation).

If you aren’t sure how to allocate your social media content mix, Hootsuite recommends following the 80/20 Rule. That is, 80% of your social media posts/content should educate and provide value while the rest will be promotional. Alternatively, you can try the Social Media Rule of Thirds, that is, evenly distribute your posts into three main activities:

When you turn relevant social media buzz about your company, your competitors, or your industry into actionable business insights, you’re doing social listening. Social listening helps you make sense of the petabytes of information waiting to be mined from conversations about you or your industry.

These insights provide a data-driven basis for a huge range of decisions—from improving social sentiment to repositioning your brand, not to mention the real-time feedback and research capabilities social listening offers.

Achieving and Measuring Branding Results

As we’ve learned earlier, social media branding covers three main objectives: increase exposure, deepen engagement, and strengthen influence. Now, we’ll take a look at the activities that drive each of these goals as well as the metrics to use.

Social media exposure refers to the number of times your content is seen. There are two related but different (and oftentimes wrongly interchanged) types of social media exposure: reach and impressions. Reach is the number of people who saw your content, while impressions are how many times people see your content.

Reach tells you how far your message is spreading. It gives you an idea of the potential audience size you can interact with. That’s why most social media metrics that involve ratios use reach as the denominator.

Impressions indicate how viral a post has become. Impressions matter in social branding because it often requires multiple touches with a user to drive interest.

Different platforms measure reach and impressions in different ways.

Facebook reports page and post reach (further divided into organic, viral, and paid) as well as impressions.

Engagement tells you how many people actually did something with your content. It’s important to keep an eye on engagement metrics since it lets you know how actively your target audience interacts with your social media branding messages.

Likes, comments, shares, retweets, replies, etc. all move the needle when it comes to social media engagement. Here’s how the top social media channels track engagement:

Facebook – the number of likes, comments, shares, and clicks your posts are generating

Not all sources agree on what social media influence is, and different campaigns use their own yardsticks to gauge influence. Social Media Examiner, for example, considers influence as the type of sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) that a company’s engagement activities generate. Kissmetrics, meanwhile, talks about influence in terms of the potential impact from people who talk about your brand.

Whatever school of thought you subscribe to, social media influence matters in branding. It increases brand visibility and consequently your reach and (possibly) engagement. Here are some ways different social media monitoring tools measure influence:

As you can see, social media branding deals with a lot of moving parts. Coming up with a coherent strategy oftentimes requires you to have a clear picture of the entire process to put everything together. With the ideas we touched in this entry, developing and executing a social media branding strategy will be a lot simpler. So, bookmark this post and review it the next time you work on your social media branding efforts.

Build your digital presence, attract the right audience, and engage potential customers with the help of Callbox’s integrated Digital Marketing Solutions.

Author Bio:

Rebecca Matias is a Business Development Manager at Callbox. She is a proactive marketer who is willing to share her passion, leadership principles and craft in marketing. Follow Rebecca on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

https://www.callboxinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/5-Social-Media-Trends-in-Canada-and-What-They-Mean-for-Lead-Generation.jpg352800Rebecca Matiashttps://www.callboxinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/callbox-logo.pngRebecca Matias2018-05-30 20:00:462018-08-10 07:53:185 Social Media Trends in Canada and What They Mean for Lead Generation

https://www.callboxinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Social-Listening-The-Power-to-Gain-Business-Insights-and-Increase-Sales.jpg352800Rebecca Matiashttps://www.callboxinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/callbox-logo.pngRebecca Matias2018-05-23 20:00:362018-07-24 12:20:13Social Listening: The Power to Gain Business Insights and Increase Sales

Social media branding is simple, but it’s not easy. While the idea behind building and maintaining your brand on social media seems straightforward (e.g., set up an account, start posting, rinse and repeat), the details can get really unwieldy.

The challenge becomes even more acute for consulting firms since reputation makes up a huge part of their business model. Social media is a great place for consulting companies to showcase their expertise and position themselves as thought leaders. But it takes a sound strategy to successfully pull off social media branding, given social media’s unpredictability.

Today’s blog entry provides a brief but complete guide to developing a social media branding strategy. We focus on consulting firms because there’s a lot of interesting things going on in these organization’s branding campaigns. Use this post’s key points as a checklist to see if your strategy needs improvement in a specific area.

Laying the Groundwork

Social media branding depends on four essential things to work as expected: identity, audience, content, and design. You need to nail each of these down before diving into creating your strategy.

Identity

Your brand identity is simply the things that people think of when they come across your company or service. Your brand identity conveys your firm’s purpose, values, and qualities to your target audience. It goes beyond brand identifiers like logos, typography, and colors. It’s everything that your brand identifiers represent.

To clearly define your brand identity, carefully go through the following checklist (brought to us by Andrew Spence at Jiggle Digital):

Know your firm’s position relative to competitors (a SWOT analysis)

Define your mission and set what your company strives to achieve

Explain why you exist (How do you make your clients’ lives better?)

Describe your brand’s personality

Craft your unique value proposition (the value that no one else can deliver except your firm)

Audience

There’s no hard-and-fast formula for success in social media branding. But the surest way to fail (borrowing an idea from Herbert Bayard Swope) is trying to appeal to everyone. Narrowing your target audience strengthens your branding since targeted messages are more relevant and compelling.

Aside from identifying your audience, you also need to understand them inside-out. That means getting into their shoes and really learning about their problems, motivations, and needs.

The content you share on social media helps define the brand image you’re trying to project. It’s important to know the difference between content for branding vs. conversion-oriented content. Branding-focused content seeks to grow the size of your audience, while lead generation content taps into the audience you’re already reaching to identify potential new clients.

Social media speaker Rebekah Radice recommends building your content strategy using what you know about your audience and finding out what content types get the most interactions on social media. For starters, she suggests experimenting with any of the following content types:

Social media is primarily a visual channel. That’s why good design goes hand-in-hand with compelling content in social media branding. Visual elements influence the way your social media followers see your brand identity. So, it pays to maintain consistent design practices across your social media assets that align with your brand image.

Having a social media style guide really helps in bringing a coherent brand experience to your social media audience, no matter which platform they interact with your brand. Sprout Social spells out the things to include in your visual guidelines (for profile images/header graphics as well as photos/graphics/videos shared within posts:

Brand colors

Fonts for graphics

Acceptable color combinations (per social platform)

Photos of your office and team members

Logos

Building Your Social Media Branding Strategy

For an industry where strategic thinking is the main product, social media’s messy reality can be off-putting to people who usually deal with clearly defined scenarios. Going for the “perfect” or a “foolproof” strategy isn’t the way to approach social media branding.

Branding strategist Peter Thompson recommends aiming for “minimum viable clarity” when developing a social media branding plan. The key thing is to gain a clear idea of basic positioning and messaging.

Brand awareness goals traditionally fall into two main categories: brand recall and brand recognition. With social media, branding goals are divided into exposure, engagement, and influence. The goals you set (such as increasing page likes or post shares) belong to any of these three.

The reason why most social media branding goals don’t stick is that they’re oftentimes too broad and unmanageable. Even branding goals need to be SMART goals, too. Here’s how to set achievable branding objectives on social media:

Gauge how well each objective you set aligns with overall business goals

Choosing the Right Platforms

It takes a decent amount of resources to maintain a genuine social media presence in just one platform. That’s why a lot of brands only concentrate on a handful of social networks at a time. But that’s okay since your target audience will only be in a small number of these channels anyway. The challenge now is to find which ones to focus on.

LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the mainstay of any social media branding strategy, especially one that’s geared toward a business audience. But there’s plenty of other industry-specific channels ideal for consulting firms’ branding initiatives, too. To determine which ones to include in your social media mix, consider the following:

Is your target audience actively using the platform?

Does the platform align with the type of content you’re sharing?

What social networks do your competitors focus on?

Peter Thompson lays out the backbone of any social media presence for consulting firms. This includes a mix of company accounts along with the personal accounts of senior partners and key employees. He suggests the following components of a basic social media portfolio:

There are two ways to join the social media conversation with your content. First is to craft original content and showcase it through your posts (content creation). The other one involves sharing relevant content from other sources (content curation).

If you aren’t sure how to allocate your social media content mix, Hootsuite recommends following the 80/20 Rule. That is, 80% of your social media posts/content should educate and provide value while the rest will be promotional. Alternatively, you can try the Social Media Rule of Thirds, that is, evenly distribute your posts into three main activities:

When you turn relevant social media buzz about your company, your competitors, or your industry into actionable business insights, you’re doing social listening. Social listening helps you make sense of the petabytes of information waiting to be mined from conversations about you or your industry.

These insights provide a data-driven basis for a huge range of decisions—from improving social sentiment to repositioning your brand, not to mention the real-time feedback and research capabilities social listening offers.

Achieving and Measuring Branding Results

As we’ve learned earlier, social media branding covers three main objectives: increase exposure, deepen engagement, and strengthen influence. Now, we’ll take a look at the activities that drive each of these goals as well as the metrics to use.

Social media exposure refers to the number of times your content is seen. There are two related but different (and oftentimes wrongly interchanged) types of social media exposure: reach and impressions. Reach is the number of people who saw your content, while impressions are how many times people see your content.

Reach tells you how far your message is spreading. It gives you an idea of the potential audience size you can interact with. That’s why most social media metrics that involve ratios use reach as the denominator.

Impressions indicate how viral a post has become. Impressions matter in social branding because it often requires multiple touches with a user to drive interest.

Different platforms measure reach and impressions in different ways.

Facebook reports page and post reach (further divided into organic, viral, and paid) as well as impressions.

Engagement tells you how many people actually did something with your content. It’s important to keep an eye on engagement metrics since it lets you know how actively your target audience interacts with your social media branding messages.

Likes, comments, shares, retweets, replies, etc. all move the needle when it comes to social media engagement. Here’s how the top social media channels track engagement:

Facebook – the number of likes, comments, shares, and clicks your posts are generating

Not all sources agree on what social media influence is, and different campaigns use their own yardsticks to gauge influence. Social Media Examiner, for example, considers influence as the type of sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) that a company’s engagement activities generate. Kissmetrics, meanwhile, talks about influence in terms of the potential impact from people who talk about your brand.

Whatever school of thought you subscribe to, social media influence matters in branding. It increases brand visibility and consequently your reach and (possibly) engagement. Here are some ways different social media monitoring tools measure influence:

As you can see, social media branding deals with a lot of moving parts. Coming up with a coherent strategy oftentimes requires you to have a clear picture of the entire process to put everything together. With the ideas we touched in this entry, developing and executing a social media branding strategy will be a lot simpler. So, bookmark this post and review it the next time you work on your social media branding efforts.

Build your digital presence, attract the right audience, and engage potential customers with the help of Callbox’s integrated Digital Marketing Solutions.

Author Bio:

Rebecca Matias is a Business Development Manager at Callbox. She is a proactive marketer who is willing to share her passion, leadership principles and craft in marketing. Follow Rebecca on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

https://www.callboxinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/5-Social-Media-Trends-in-Canada-and-What-They-Mean-for-Lead-Generation.jpg352800Rebecca Matiashttps://www.callboxinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/callbox-logo.pngRebecca Matias2018-05-30 20:00:462018-08-10 07:53:185 Social Media Trends in Canada and What They Mean for Lead Generation

https://www.callboxinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Social-Listening-The-Power-to-Gain-Business-Insights-and-Increase-Sales.jpg352800Rebecca Matiashttps://www.callboxinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/callbox-logo.pngRebecca Matias2018-05-23 20:00:362018-07-24 12:20:13Social Listening: The Power to Gain Business Insights and Increase Sales

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Founded in 2004, Callbox is the largest provider of Multi-Touch Multi-Channel Marketing solutions for businesses and organizations worldwide. Its core competencies include Lead Generation, Appointment Setting, Lead Nurturing and Database Services, delivered through its proprietary marketing automation platform, the Callbox Pipeline.

Callbox enables companies to gain a foothold in their priority markets by initiating conversations with prospects through the efficient and intelligent use of targeted touchpoints over six channels: voice, email, social, chat, website and mobile.